“But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.”
More from Virginia Woolf
“I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together…”
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
“They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of…”
“I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrow-like here…”